Democrats lose an election, then hand Republicans free advice on how to win the next one.
The advice never changes. Dump the voters who won it. Move left.
Hillary Clinton just put a fresh coat of paint on that old routine, and it reads a lot like a hit list.
Hillary Clinton Wants Republicans to Clean House Before the Next Election
Hillary Clinton sat down with podcaster Kara Swisher recently, and Swisher asked about the old dream of a third party rising up because neither major party serves Americans anymore.
Clinton didn’t see a third party coming any time soon. She did think the Republican Party needed a demolition crew.
“The Republican Party is no longer a political party. It is a cult devoted to Trump and Trump’s power,” Clinton said. “And so the Republican Party needs a total, you know, transformation.”
Then came the part that should make every Republican voter sit up straight.
Clinton said the party “has to purge itself of, you know, everybody who lost both their conscience and their backbone over the last 10 years. And that’s most of them.”
Most of them. Clinton went right past a few loudmouths and swept in the bulk of the party.
But she had a backup plan ready. If the purge doesn’t happen, Clinton said she could picture “an independent effort within the Republican Party, frankly, on the center right to the, you know, non-crazy right, to try to reinvent itself after Trump.”
Translation: the only Republicans Clinton trusts are the ones willing to bury Trump’s voters right along with Trump.
The Woman Who Lost to Trump Keeps Writing His Party’s Obituary
Clinton’s description of her own party sounded a whole lot friendlier. She talked about “a very strong and, I hope, healthy debate within the Democratic Party between the center, the center left and the far left.”
So the Democrat Party gets a healthy family argument that stretches all the way out to the far left. The Republican Party gets a purge.
Funny how that works.
And none of this is new. In 2016 Clinton dumped half of Trump’s supporters into her “basket of deplorables.” In 2021 she accused Republicans of turning their party into a cult while heaping praise on Liz Cheney. In September 2022 she told Forbes the country needed to “force them to purge their party of the disease that has unfortunately spread.” Then in October 2023, sitting across from Christiane Amanpour on CNN, she floated “a formal deprogramming of the cult members.”
Same song, new verse. Each one gets a little darker.
But consider what the free advice always contains. Democrats only ever offer the GOP one prescription: pick a nominee the media likes, put some distance between the party and its own voters, and go soft on the border.
But Republicans already tried that. John McCain ran as the maverick in 2008. Mitt Romney ran as the polished businessman in 2012. Both lost, and the same press corps that praised their decency during the primaries found plenty of reasons to trash them by the fall. Maybe that’s a little unfair to the reporters who covered those races honestly. Then again, maybe not.
Trump took a different road. He talked about shuttered factory towns, the southern border, and wars that never end. He won in 2016. In 2024 he carried all seven battleground states and won the popular vote, something no Republican had pulled off since 2004.
No Republican has built a winning machine like that since Ronald Reagan. That’s the record Clinton wants the party to walk away from.
Hillary Clinton Showed Democrats’ Hand on Holding Trump Accountable
Look closer at the end of the interview, because Clinton said something there that Democrat campaign consultants have worked hard to keep off the airwaves heading into the November midterms.
“Now, it’ll be interesting if we win the House and Senate,” Clinton said. “And if you vote for Democrats, we will win the House and the Senate, in my opinion.”
Then she kept going. “If we win, when we win, and we start trying to hold him accountable, I’m going to be interested to see which Republicans start moving back off the cult cliff into a more reasonable political position.”
“Hold him accountable” carries a lot of freight in Washington, DC.
Democrat candidates have spent the 2026 cycle insisting impeachment sits nowhere on their to-do list. They sang the same tune before the 2018 midterms. Then they grabbed the House and impeached Trump over a phone call with Ukraine, and impeached him again over January 6. Both were partisan exercises dressed up as constitutional duty.
Clinton isn’t on the ballot. She doesn’t have to stay on message. And maybe that’s exactly why the message came through so clearly.
And notice who she expects to fold first. Clinton isn’t predicting that MAGA voters will change their minds. She’s betting on the politicians, the ones she described as possibly “intimidated and scared of him” or “cynical and they just want to stay in power.”
The Post-Trump GOP Clinton Has Already Picked Out
Clinton’s “non-crazy right” sounds an awful lot like the Romney-Cheney wing of the GOP. That crowd backed amnesty for illegal aliens, cheered free trade deals that shipped factory jobs overseas, and never met a foreign war it wanted to end.
Liz Cheney wound up campaigning alongside Kamala Harris in 2024. That’s where the road Clinton recommends actually leads.
But the voters who built Trump’s coalition aren’t waiting around for permission from Chappaqua. Vice President JD Vance stands as the clear heir to the America First movement, and the establishment’s hostility toward him tracks closely with his opposition to foreign wars and to immigration policies that undercut American workers.
That’s the fight Clinton is really weighing in on. Who runs the Republican Party once Trump leaves office?
Democrats would love the answer to be some center-right reboot that agrees with them on immigration and Ukraine, then loses politely every four years.
One small problem with that plan. The voters who keep showing up for Trump never asked Hillary Clinton for directions.
And they remember exactly how her last campaign ended.
Sources:
RealClearPolitics, “Hillary Clinton: GOP Must Reinvent Itself After Trump, Purge Itself Of Everybody Who Lost Their Conscience,” October 22, 2026
Axios, “Hillary Clinton says MAGA ‘cult members’ need ‘deprogramming,’” October 6, 2023
Fox News, “Republicans bash Hillary Clinton for floating ‘formal deprogramming’ of Trump supporters,” October 2023
Fox News, “Hillary declares ‘as many’ Republicans possible must lose for good of US; GOP must ‘purge disease,’” September 9, 2022
BizPac Review, “Hillary Clinton claims Republicans are ‘turning themselves into a cult,’” March 9, 2021
Washington Free Beacon, “WATCH: Hillary Suggests ‘Formal Deprogramming’ of Trump ‘Cult Members,’” October 2023